Knives in the Water (Cont.)

Outside Magaine November 2002

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	What $75 million buys: A Oneworld Challenge yacht heads to sea. (Jeff Reidel)

CLOSE YOUR EYES and try to imagine Lance Armstrong ditching U.S. Postal to take up with a European cycling team. You'll feel just a trace of the outrage that swept New Zealand in May 2000. That's when Russell Coutts, a 40-year-old Kiwi and perhaps the best pure match racer on the planet, and 43-year-old countryman Brad Butterworth, his longtime tactician, jumped ship from Team New Zealand to Ernesto Bertarelli's Alinghi syndicate.

Coutts and Butterworth, who took some of New Zealand's best sail trimmers with them, had been expected to lead their homeland's 2003 defense. To this day they have refused to publicly discuss the internal organizational disagreements that drove them offshore, but a pair of rumored $5 million Alinghi contracts likely helped close the deal.

New Zealand media equated the defections with treason ("TRAITORS!" blared a headline in the Sunday News, a weekly tabloid.)

Sometimes the engineers go just a fraction too far. Rigs fall, keels snap pff and sails shred. It's hardly an America's Cup unless at least one boat sinks or folds like a jackknife.

To appreciate the fuss, it's important to understand New Zealand's total obsession with sailing. When the Commonwealth country of four million first won the America's Cup, in 1995, the feat was compared to Hillary's first ascent of Mount Everest. Prime Minister Jim Bolger declared the day an unofficial holiday.

Now, two years after the defection, the buzz in Auckland ranges from the still-seething—"I'm surprised they let him back in the country," growls one patron at the Loaded Hog—to a more benign view of Coutts as a money-struck prodigal son.

For his part, Coutts says he is enjoying his new life as a Swiss national—America's Cup rules require team members to establish residency—and blithely explains away his new allegiance as a boon to competition. "Look at the talent that's spread throughout these teams," he says. "This is the best America's Cup yet."

But you have to wonder about the conflicting emotions he and Butterworth will go through if Alinghi wins the Louis Vuitton Cup and lines up in February against Team New Zealand.

Whether that dramatic moment arrives will depend a lot on Larry Ellison and the sailors, boatbuilders, and support crew of Oracle BMW Racing. Ellison jumped into the 31st America's Cup on the kind of whim only a multibillionaire could afford. In May 2000, while celebrating victory at Antigua Race Week's awards dinner, he was chatting with Tony Rae, one of several Team New Zealand sailors who regularly sailed aboard Ellison's 80-foot racing yacht Sayonara. Rae told Ellison about the plundering of Team New Zealand's talent. This gave Ellison bright ideas about what his money could buy.

"You mean I could sail with you in the America's Cup?" Ellison asked.

"Yes," Rae answered—although he ultimately remained loyal to New Zealand.

"Well, let's do it," Ellison responded, committing himself to a multimillion-dollar investment as if he were ordering a cup of decaf.

With Ellison, anything is possible. He's famous in Silicon Valley for being supremely self-confident, always hungry to win, and willing to spend whatever it takes. He's a skilled amateur skipper who has been steering Sayonara to victory in the world's top regattas since 1995. To kick off his America's Cup campaign, he snapped up the 2000-vintage boats used by fellow San Franciscan Paul Cayard's AmericaOne syndicate, and set Annapolis-based Bruce Farr—the best yacht designer never to have won the Cup—loose on plans for two new yachts.

Ellison then leveraged his resources to create a computerized design program that allowed Farr to scroll through hundreds of virtual Cup-class boats, probing every possibility for marginal increments of speed. Farr ended up running through as many as 500 hulls a day. (A standard design program might analyze a handful.) Using a so-called velocity-prediction program, which takes the myriad design parameters of a boat—like length, displacement, sail area, and beam—and speculates how it will perform over a range of wind angles and wind speeds, Farr staged millions of "races" between the most promising hulls. Test results were sent around the world almost instantly to everyone in the design team, allowing the group to sort through data and move ahead while other syndicates were still manually collating information and banging out e-mails.

At the same time, Oracle BMW Racing created its own wind tunnel in Ventura, California, to test hundreds of sail shapes. And down on the Hauraki Gulf, a meteorology team led by American Bob Rice, the best-known sailing forecaster in the business, was gathering round-the-clock wind speed and direction data using a fleet of six boats and a weather buoy rented exclusively to Oracle. Rice, 71, was delighted by the resources that Oracle threw his way.

"It was almost as simple as ÔWhat do you need?' " he says.

Out of this sophisticated and seamless integration of design, sail, and wind data emerged a striking pair of race boats that are narrow as missiles, with slightly upturned canoe-style bows. And given Ellison's lust for competition, no one raised an eyebrow when he made it clear that at times he plans to drive the boat himself. That part of the plan has rivals detecting an ego trip, but Ellison could pull it off. Bill Koch spent some time behind the wheel in his successful 1992 campaign.

"If [Ellison's] boat is fast enough," Dennis Conner says, "and someone is standing alongside him saying, 'Steer up a little' or 'Steer down a little,' and he has a two-minute lead, he'll be just like Koch. Smile at the TV cameras!"

Theatrics aside, Ellison is smart enough to stay out of the way and leave the heavy pre-start driving to Peter Holmberg, 41, the last professional helmsman left standing at Oracle BMW racing. That way he'll avoid the likes of Peter Gilmour, 42, OneWorld's lead helmsman and a notoriously aggressive match racer who would enjoy nothing more than carving up a guy like Ellison. Gilmour is a pug-faced Australian and a canny, hard-nosed sailor who in his younger America's Cup days was known as "Crash."

"Gilly is always willing to put the knife in," says Ian Walker, GBR Challenge's skipper. Gilmour himself only partially disagrees.

"Typically, as you get older you get more conservative in your boat handling. It's the young guys that don't give a fuck," he says. "But as the great match racer Harold Cudmore once told me, 'I don't have any moves myself. I just wait for the other guy to make a move and pounce.'"

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